by Ajay Close
The next week the family comes north, renting a house around the corner from Balhousie Bank. They all know about my sweetheart, as Uncle George has taken to calling him. I welcome the teasing at first. It gives substance to a courtship that can seem, in the cold light of morning, mostly air. Having been in love with Bill, I recognise the symptoms. I lose what little appetite I’ve had, ignore the people around me and think about him all the time. The trouble is, I have so little to go on. What do I know of him? My aunt’s account of his dignity when handed the white feather, and three conversations: one when I did most of the talking, one plagued by interruptions from thirsty playgoers, and one managed without speech, as he lingered by the garden gate and I watched him from the window. My uncle and aunt are astonished to learn he has been living in Perth for two years. He belongs to no club or congregation, doesn’t bat or bowl or cloister himself with the Freemasons. The only person who seems to have heard of him, Miss Fairlie of the Sick Poor Nursing Society, gives me a narrow look and changes the subject. Which, I decide, could mean anything.
The mercury rises to eighty-five degrees. All day his house cooks. He gets Mrs Hendry to strip his bed of blankets but, even with the windows open, the night grips his chest in its sticky embrace. One evening he retires without pyjamas and, waking in the dark with a raging thirst, twists to retrieve the glass of water at his bedside. The linen sheet brushes his engorged member. He waits. Some nights it subsides of its own accord. St John’s bell chimes the quarter, and then the half-hour. Groaning, he turns to lie on his belly. Against his will, his mind conjures a nightdress, soft white skin, a cloud of dark hair. Mine? Or hers?
Next morning he decides to have nothing more to do with me. I know it. I wake up feeling such a fool. All this fuss over nothing. How Hilda will mock. When Uncle George makes some harmless joke about my future as a doctor’s wife, I snap at him. A walk along the river. No, I don’t want company. I suppress every thought of him, but they’re like ants: kill one and another ten arrive on its trail. Nine days since I last saw him. If I were a man, nothing would keep me from my loved one’s door. Quod erat demonstrandum. The prison is on the other side of town, by the South Inch. Not far. Why should I not take a look, since we are nothing to each other?
The size of it. Towering over the landscape. Like a city within its high walls. The sun beats down on the soot-blackened cell blocks, the windows little more than slots. The sight darkens my spirits like news of a death. How can he spend his days in this place and it not leave some mark on him?
Edinburgh University awards him a diploma in public health. For a day or two he sinks into despondency. It’s always like this when he gains the longed-for qualification: this hollowness, after years of endeavour. A day out in his hired gown, a chance to shake the vice-chancellor’s hand, his fellow diplomates taking their wives and mothers and sisters to lunch while he slinks away to the museum in Chambers Street. Studying has been the best part of his life, filling his empty weekends, helping him rise above the sordor of the prison.
He is aware of me in Balhousie Bank. I exert a magnetic pull which grows stronger if he ventures into town. Uncanny, meeting me at the theatre like that. First time he’d been inside the place. I was flushed from the heat of so many bodies, my colour deepening when I saw him. But what’s the use? I’m here on holiday. By the autumn I’ll be home again, dining with Lord This and Lady That, flitting between the ballet and the opera and hunt balls and weekend house parties, telling my friends about this funny little Scotchman I met.
This feeling he wakes up with in the mornings, the nameless residue of his dreams. Prisoner Lennox is the only patient in the women’s hospital. A recurring blood disorder. Matron has put her in the middle bed, facing the window. There’s no physical resemblance but, walking in yesterday, seeing the summer light strike her form under the blanket, he almost cried out. It has been two years. For weeks at a stretch he won’t think of her. Then suddenly every moment brings some fresh reminder. Where is she now? The suffragettes have disappeared from the newspapers. The government offered them an amnesty when war broke out. They’re driving ambulances, nursing in field hospitals. Safer than fighting, but not without its dangers. Or is she still in Edinburgh, keeping the home fires burning? And if she is, might their paths not cross again?
Three days later he has a change of heart. I have a hundred theories. He wants to reconcile with his parents. It will further his career. Boredom. Sexual frustration. Fear of growing old alone. We are staying in Pitlochry for a fortnight: Uncle, Aunt, Pa, Mama, Hilda and myself. We sketch and bicycle and walk up Ben Vrackie and every second of it I am talking to him in my head. One afternoon we go boating on the Tummel and return around six, weary and dishevelled and rather damp. The doctor is waiting on the grassy bank outside the station master’s cottage we have rented.
SIXTEEN
Already he seems part of the family. He dines with us, joins our walks and expeditions. When we cycle out to Moulin, where my great-grandmother was born, he asks all the right questions, setting the Richmonds’ decline in shame-free perspective. The wealth they amassed by canny use of drainage and potash. Borrowing to farm more and more land once the railway arrived to take produce to London, leaving them that much more vulnerable to cheap imported American grain and the dead hand of the Depression. Despite himself, Pa is impressed. I’m pleased about this, and at the same time put out. So far, I have been the doctor’s principal interest. My eyes, my hair, how well I look in red, my love of cornflowers and yellowhammers and wire-haired terriers. No doubt I play a part in his engagement with Mama’s family history, but I’m beginning to realise it is ideas that move him. Not the sort of ideas Bill and I could debate late into the night, about art and feeling and whether the new age of machines will change the human soul. The doctor – Hugh, as I learn to call him – will listen to such talk in silence, before moving on to the more comfortable ground of facts.
But this is a small thing beside the way his eyes follow me when I move away from him, and how readily he laughs at my jokes and teases my aversion to spiders, and the heart-stopping moment when he catches me up in his arms and carries me across a patch of bog. The feeling of being held by him, helpless and protected and womanly. The startling discovery that every simple thing you are is mysteriously precious to someone else. As his manliness is precious to me. Oh God, his shoulders. The timbre of his voice, the way it roughens when he speaks of Ayrshire. The two of us strolling between the hedgerows at dusk, with the flittering moths catching the last of the day’s light, and the air cooling, and the heat of his body held in the lining of his jacket when he slips it over my dress. His smell. Hot chestnuts in newspaper, and saddle leather, and empty train compartments on long journeys, and potatoes just pulled from the black earth. And none of these, really. He smells of himself.
He loves to hear me talk about America. The endless corn fields. Clapboard churches whitened by the scouring wind. Homesick Scots curling on the frozen lake in winter. Saturday-night socials held in tin huts, the women dancing with each other because the navvies have poured so many surreptitious slops of rye into their tea they can barely stand, let alone steer a girl around the dirt floor. They called Emmetsburg the new Edinburgh. Pa went out at twenty-four, to be secretary and treasurer of the Scottish American Land Company. There was money to be made building houses along the new railroad. Mama couldn’t bear the vulgarity of the place, so Pa brought us back to England, but my Uncle James is still out there. And my Uncle Thomas, who gave his last five hundred pounds to a swindler and spent three years as a cowhand with the Muskatine Cattle Company before he’d saved enough to start his own ranch.
It’s after I finish this story that Hugh asks ‘Would you go back?’ I say yes, one day, although I’ve never really thought about it. Hilda is in the window seat with her nose in a book but, I now realise, eavesdropping. ‘She can’t remember it. She left when she was three.’ Which is mean of her because I never claimed to be speaking from memory. And this i
s when he says, ‘I’d go.’
So far he has said nothing of his intentions. Mama dotes on him with the fondness a woman five years older can afford to show a future son-in-law. Hilda has been driving me mad, humming Mendelssohn’s wedding march under her breath whenever she walks past us. While we can’t deny it is in the air, we do our best to ignore it. It’s funny: I have spent the past two years daydreaming about a man – any man – asking me to marry him, and now I’d quite happily postpone the moment. But is he working up to a proposal, or just making a whimsical remark? There’s no way of finding out, with Hilda here. My sister and my suitor do not care for each other. Though preferable to the alternative (Hilda is a very pretty girl), this brings its own difficulties. And will bring more.
He has taken a week’s leave from the prison. Usually he arranges locum work on one of the Hebridean islands, treating consumptive adolescents and liverish crofters pickled in home-distilled potato spirit. He has never spent a holiday in idleness before. He takes the precaution of packing some medical periodicals. We make gentle fun of him for arriving at a celebrated beauty spot only to bring out the latest copy of the Journal of Mental Science. He came here hoping for an afternoon walk, maybe an invitation to tea, but every evening we ask which would he prefer tomorrow, croquet or cycling, a picturesque church or ruined towerhouse? If it were just the two of us it might be a strain, keeping me amused for hour upon hour but, in a group of seven, it is only polite to fall into conversation with my uncle, or my aunt, whose good-natured cleverness he finds so congenial. Mama often walks alongside him, enquiring about his family, admiring his mother for bringing up six children when she found three quite exhausting. Pa is warier, but has talked with him enough to ascertain that he has a tied house and seven hundred pounds a year. Considering Hugh had not met half the party a week ago, he is remarkably at ease with us, so long as he ignores my younger sister.
The days slip by. Every so often he catches one of the family studying him. To hell with their expectations. And yet, if I return to London and he hears word that I’m engaged to somebody else, he won’t like it. On Thursday he excuses himself from the general expedition: he’ll go back to Moulin and see the crusader grave in the churchyard. I offer to go with him. There’s a brief pause in the conversation, as everyone weighs the advantages of privacy against the notional impropriety. We set off after lunch, on the hottest day so far in this blistering summer, cycling side by side. Wonderingly, I remark that there are at least three different heats in the day: the fiery burn of the sun on our shoulders, the thick warmth adjacent to stone walls and metalled roads, and the hot wind. When he begins to explain the physical principles at work, I interrupt him: ‘I understand there’s a reason, but sometimes the thing itself is enough.’
Reaching Moulin, we lean our bicycles against the church wall and inspect the flat stone carved with a sword. He can see at a glance it’s no earlier than sixteenth century. He is ready to climb back on his bicycle and join the others in their hunt for wild raspberries, but I want to visit the castle where I played as a child. We pick a path through a field of brown-faced lambs as big as their mothers but still nosing for the teat, to a baking pile of stones. So much less romantic than I remember. Again he is ready to turn back, but I insist on leading him up through the oak woods, to see the famed Black Spout.
It is cool and dark here in the trees, with dazzling patches where the sun gets through, making it hard to see the loose stones and exposed roots on the parched earth path. Twice I stumble and he has to catch my arm. The climb is making me short of breath. I laugh for no reason, telling him how beautiful the wood is when the bluebells are out, drawing his attention to the lichen that looks like distemper painted on the deeply-grooved oak trunks. He lets me chatter, keeping a careful eye on the route we take, not sure I will be able to find my way back, but I know exactly where I’m going. I stop a few feet from the steeply-plunging gorge. He hears the sound of rushing water but sees only the chequerboard pattern of glare and shadow. I point. He squints through the leaves, shaking his head. I say the trees have grown since I used to come here, but if we move a little nearer the edge I am sure we will have a better view. He tells me it’s too dangerous, my father has entrusted me to his care, but I pay no heed. He orders me back to the path, his raised voice setting off a chaffinch’s alarm call. I laugh at him. He is angry enough to think about grabbing me and dragging me back, but I’m out of his reach now. And what if he lost his footing and sent us both over?
‘I see it!’ I say over my shoulder. ‘Oh, not so impressive as I remember. I suppose there’s less water in the river. But still, it’s worth seeing. Come on, it’s quite safe.’
When he crosses the platform at Perth Station, he has to steel himself not to look through the gaps in the iron footbridge. He knows vertigo is a dysfunction of the vestibular system, but this knowledge is less potent than his fear. He would rather lose a couple of fingers than take a step towards the gorge, but what choice does he have? He needs to bring me back to the path. He can’t return to the station master’s cottage and tell my parents he did nothing as I fell to my death.
He arrives alongside me. Through the filtering branches, he sees the streak of white water dropping two hundred feet down sheer black rock. Brilliance and shadow swarm before his eyes. His stomach turns over.
‘Hold me,’ I say.
He doesn’t know what I mean. He is incapable of thought, mind and body rigid. I take his hand and wrap it around my waist, then reach for the other hand, making his arms a loose belt around me and turning away from him to face the falls. My body cants forward and he is forced to take my weight as I lean out into empty space.
He cries, ‘Arabella!’
The air in the station master’s cottage is too stifling to eat inside. We drag the table into the garden and dine in the perfume of roses and honeysuckle. The trout Uncle George caught is so fresh it hardly tastes of fish. After, we eat the tiny, tart raspberries, sugared and floating in the creamy milk the dairyman brings us each morning. Tomorrow we return to Perth. The doctor has not asked for my hand. When I pulled his arms around me he was stiff as a clothes horse. He said nothing on the walk back to the church. I hoped the roaring water would rouse his passion, but instead it has turned him cold.
Dusk falls late at this time of year. Imperceptibly the clear light fades, the distinctness of every leaf and flower grows mottled. The sky is mauve at the horizon, shading into a layer like strawberry jam, then up through antique gold to a pure pale lemon that is also, mysteriously, a kind of blue. The doctor leaves us. We glance at each other, bemused. Ten minutes later, he is back with a borrowed violin. He pulls his chair away from the table and plays a plaintive air with astonishing sweetness. I never guessed he had this music in him. When he finishes the tune Aunt Nellie tries to applaud, but he plays over her, starting another. And then another, and another. Hilda retires to bed. George and Nellie follow, and Mama and Pa, until at last I am alone with him in the soft, scented dark.
When he lowers the bow, he says, ‘I will never let you risk your life like that again.’
Exultation thrills through me, but I answer quietly, ‘And how do you propose to stop me?’
SEVENTEEN
‘I hope you haven’t let him examine you,’ Hilda drawls.
I look at her.
She shrugs, ‘It has been known.’
Bill should never have told her.
She’s in my room, riffling through the letters in my writing desk. At last she finds what she’s looking for.
‘Such a manly hand. Can I read it?’ Already she has it out of the envelope.
‘No!’
She puts it behind her back, out of my reach. ‘Are you sure you haven’t given him a little something on account?’
‘He hasn’t even asked.’
Telling her this is a mistake. Her cat’s eyes gleam.
‘Not a kiss?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Lips open or closed?’
‘It’s none of your business.’ On the brow. Until this moment I didn’t know it bothered me. I’ve seen that look in his eye, I don’t doubt him, but he almost never touches me.
‘He’s certainly made a hit with Mama. I’m not so sure about Pa.’
‘He’ll come round when we give him a grandson.’
She tosses the letter at me, suddenly bored by my fiancé and what we might get up to together. ‘So when’s the joyous occasion?’
‘December fourteenth.’
‘December? You’d better make it sooner than that, or Mama will marry him herself.’
Now he is back at the prison, he calls on me Tuesday and Thursday evenings, and Sunday afternoons. It seems to him the proper balance. We will see each other every day soon enough. With the question settled, he keeps me in the back of his mind. It is more for my sake than his that he writes to me on the days we spend apart. Slightly stilted letters about his work, or the war’s latest turn, or a meteor shower he saw last night. The last line takes him as long to compose as all the rest. And so, good night, my dearest. Sealing this with a kiss. He grimaces, scoring out the conventional phrases, replacing them with Yours respectfully, Hugh. In his mind’s eye, my lips pucker in amusement. Again he strikes a line through the words.
Yours, ever the same, Hugh.
We fall into the habit of making an expedition on Sunday afternoons. Scone Palace; Drummond Castle’s classical gardens; windswept Dunsinane Hill; my mother’s lost family seat, Balhaldie House in Dunblane. One day we take the train to Dunning and a pony and trap to Trinity Gask church. It’s a pretty spot, with its view across the fertile strath. In the tiny graveyard dark yews guard the modest, white-walled kirk. My grandfather farmed a couple of thousand acres here, as well as Balhaldie, and other pockets of land across the county. I point out the roof of Lawhill farmhouse, where my mother was born. He likes the fact that one side of my family is gentry; that they came from nothing and amassed great wealth and lost it all again in the space of a hundred years; that we are both of farming stock, and the Richmonds’ luck – good and bad – is only a throw of the dice away from the Watsons’.